GameStop presented the Q1 2020 financial results yesterday. In the follow-up earnings call, GameStop CEO George Sherman highlighted a wave of brand new gamers induced by the COVID-19 lockdowns throughout the world.
[...] we saw this early on when the store closures began, between the last couple of weeks of March and going into April, and it really showed up in the form of hardware sales predominantly. I think we mentioned that any game that was launched in this timeframe really did better than expected. And that's on a large scale basis, like Animal Crossing, and then certainly smaller games performed much better as well. We saw a lot of new interest and we saw obviously a lot of hardware purchasing late in the console cycle.
And we know that our core GameStop customer has long since bought second devices and is looking ahead toward the next generation consoles in November. So we're certain that we saw new gamers come in, we don't have any reason to believe that it is a return to gaming, we think that it's net new gaming predominantly. And that shows up for us in terms of loyalty as net new e-mail addresses and net interest.
So it's truly beneficial to us. I mean, anytime that the overall pie gets bigger, we benefit from that, given our market share. So yes, by all means, it's something that we can parlay into conversations with our partners as we look down the road. Certainly our hope would be that we can maintain close contact, build that social interaction with these new GameStop customers, get them deeper and deeper into gaming and have them start looking forward to new consoles as well.
So yes, no doubt. I mean, hardware was a pretty scarce commodity and very, very end of cycle. And then of course the Nintendo Switch, which is still, very, very viable, did amazingly well. As we said, we think we're the largest sellers in the world of that device. And we get them in, we sell them out in 24 hours. So there's still big demand in, which we think is largely attributable to new gamers.
This is a glimmer of hope in the company's otherwise relatively bleak prospects as the gaming industry moves from retail to digital distribution. However, the advent of new gamers (already noted by Activision and Electronic Arts, two of the biggest publishers) could certainly prove to be an unexpected but very welcome boon for GameStop.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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